Medicine

 Ancient Egyptian Medicine  What is medicine? Medicine is something you need to make you feel better. The word medicine was Latin verb before it became medicine. Mederi meant “to heal.” Without healing it would be harder to live and a lot more people would die. In its time ancient Egypt was advanced in medicine, as it was in many things. While some of the cures did not work most did. Sometimes, today, we use similar things to what the Egyptians use to heal themselves. The ancient Egyptians really were one of the most advanced civilizations of it’s time. Physicians (doctors) and their knowledge In ancient times who would the Egyptians go to when they were in pain? They would go and find a physician to heal them. The English word Physician came from a Greek noun physis. Physis means “nature.” The word “doctor” is actually a Latin word for teacher. The Egyptian word for doctor is sunu. Sunu were skilled and many foreign people wanted to be treated by Egyptian Sunu. Not all the sunu doctors were male but sometimes they were female. There was one woman in the old kingdom who was the supervisor of woman Sunu.

What they learnt was from experimenting and from killing animals, then studying their insides knowing that their insides are similar to ours. They did know a lot about anatomy. Their knowledge helped mummification. It helped them know how to remove what parts and how to preserve the body. Even though they knew a lot about how the body works, they thought that the heart was more important than the brain. They thought it was their heart that gave them their thoughts. They also knew that there was some relation in heart and pulse. One of the things they did not know of was the circulating system. They did not very often the treat the cause of the illness but instead the symptoms. But even though some parts of the healing they got wrong they really were the best physicians in their time. Scrolls When an Egyptian scribe wanted to write down some information they wrote it down on a papyrus scroll. Physicians wrote what they learnt and what they looked for in scrolls. The information on medicine went to the house of life which is a room in a temple.

There are many scrolls there describing different things in medicine. There are a few scrolls on symptoms of certain illnesses and there is some on disease that are particularly suffered by woman and children. Others explain how to treat different types of wounds. Some tell how to mix medicines and these are referred to as recipe scrolls. Ancient Egyptian scrolls are famous for being so through and detailed.

There is a scroll which is the most famous one of all the Ancient Egyptian scrolls and is known as the Scroll of Surgery. The scroll is about 3,550 years old but it isn’t the oldest. There was a scroll found 1,000 years older. The scroll also labels some problems too hopeless to fix and other problems labelled as fixable is scroll is so though and tells us that early on the Egyptians knew a lot of things in medicine. We can learn a lot from all of those scrolls. Ancient Egyptian Common Illnesses  Ancient Egyptians had many illnesses. Most illnesses were caused by parasites. In the Nile water of the canals made for irrigation there were sometimes shustosoures worms. Those worms laid eggs in the blood stream. When that happened it made blood go into the urine. Sometimes they got illness they couldn’t avoid. One thing that they couldn’t avoid but was harmful, was breathing in sand which gave them chest infections, blocked sinuses and headaches. They also couldn’t stop breathing in the smoke from the cooking fire. Breathing in smoke from any fire gave them black lung disease. In ancient Egypt they had many lung problems. The Ancient Egyptians had so many problems but the ones above are some of the most common illnesses they suffered from.

Treatments To heal patients doctors had special treatments. Some worked and others were useless. One treatment that was useless was for nearsightedness. To treat that they would make a mixture of honey, lead and water from a pig’s eye and then pored the mixture into the ear slowly. That treatment did not help, but some were so good we still use it today. Ancient Egyptians used hartshorn (crushed deer antler) as sometimes we do today. Also Ancient Egyptians used a mixture of honey and acacin for birth control. Today it’s an ingredient in some birth controls. Ancient Egyptian doctors knew how to set broken bones and were one of the first to use bandagers and compresses. They knew to make the scare less visible the doctors would sew up the wound. The ancient Egyptian doctors even knew of moving one part of the skin to another which is called skin graphing. The treatments that the Ancient Egyptians had really were amazing. Dentistry Ancient Egyptians had many common problems in heath but one of them was teeth. One of their problems was that their teeth got worn down when sand got in their bread. Teeth that were worn down could cause infection and loss of teeth. To fix these problems they had dentists. the Egyptians called there dentists ibniny. Ibniny can make false teeth and treat infections. For other problems they filled cavities but it wasn’t much of a problem since they didn’t have very many sweet foods. One ibniny was Liesi Re. He was one of the world’s first’s dentists as he lived 4, 600 years ago. He was also chief of dentists and physicians in his time. **Magic, spells and Amulets** Magic has always believed to be here. It was in Persia which is now Iran, but their word for magic is magus. It means priest, fire worshipper and magician. The Greeks make magus to magos meaning “a person skilled in the art of sorcery or magic.” Over time magos turns to magikos which means magical. Then over more time the Greeks word magikos turned into the English word magic. People think of magic differently.

Ancient Egyptians thought magic was serious and helped in healing. In ancient Egypt they not only relied on medicine for healing but magic and the gods as well. A doctor would not only be good at healing and mixing medicine but also in magic. There was no difference from magic, science and religion. To explain how the world worked they made up explainations using all of those things. They said that magic especially made childbirth easier and helped fevers. When you were sick they sometimes thought that demons were attacking the body and to cure those problems they had to expel the demons using magic. To fix other things they made mixtures out of plants. With out those plants there would be no magic since they used plants every time they used magic. Sometimes while tying or untying a bandage they would say spells. The spells most of the time were passages praising the gods and describing what the body should do to fix the wound. The two things most common things that they healed using magic were scorpion stings and snakebites.

Sometimes the patients were given amulets to keep any more bad things from happening. The amulets came in many forms. The amulets could be made up of knots or could be a headrest and sometimes on pillars. They could be little charms they could put on bracelets or necklaces. They also put amulets in the bandages of a Mummy to keep anything bad from happening in the other realm. So magic really did help magic. Magic gave the ancient Egyptians something else to believe in. <span style="font-size: 130%; color: #080808; font-family: Georgia, serif;">**Gods and Goddesses of Medicine**

There are many gods and goddesses but a few helped in medicine. To help with childbirth was a goddess shown as a pregnant Hippo. Taweret the goddess of childbirth also is also shown with fierce faces to scare away things that would harm the baby. When a woman gets pregnant they pray to Taweret to help protect their baby and help everything go right. Another God that helps in medicine is Horus. One of the many things he does is protect people from being harmed in the desert. So when anyone travelled in the desert they pray to Horus and ask to keep them safe. That way they believed that no one would suffer scorpion stings and snakebites. He was also believed to make sure that no one would bitten by crocodiles. Imhotep did know spells to go with treatments. He was the best doctor in his time. It was because of his knowledge in medicine not because of his writing that he became famous. He helped bring together magic, healing and wisdom. After he died he became more famous until till he was made a god. Every year they have festables 6 times a year to celebrate the important stages in his life. It was believed that he would keep healing them from the other realm. He was a remarkable man. He is really the most accomplished Egyptian god. <span style="font-size: 130%; color: #080808; font-family: Georgia, serif;">**Conclusion of Egyptian medicine**

Now you see that the Ancient Egyptians really were skilled at healing. They had many amazing cures which included magic. Many things were needed many things. Magic and d<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;">entistry among other things. Their thoughts were like ours in many ways as well as different. This just shows the world how we are no and what we were then.

by Annika